Additive manufacturing or 3D printing is an emerging technology, where a product is manufactured based on a digital design file or computer aided design (CAD) file. The additive manufacturing printers or 3D printers add the raw material of the product layer by layer, and then firm up each layer using laser so as to get the final product as per the specification of the digital design file. Initially, additive manufacturing technology was employed for rapid prototyping of products before the actual mass production begins. However, advancement in the field of additive manufacturing coupled with decline in cost of additive manufacturing have resulted in increasing adaption of additive manufacturing not only for rapid prototyping but also for mass production. For example, metal manufacturing industry is employing additive manufacturing technology for rapid prototyping. Further, plastic manufacturing, food products, and toys manufacturing industries are increasingly employing additive manufacturing for mass production.
As will be appreciated, for operationalizing the mass production through additive manufacturing, the design files or CAD files need to be shared by the owner or creator of the design to the additive manufacturing vendor who owns the additive manufacturing printers so as to physically manufacture the products. However, current techniques for sharing these design files between the design owner and additive manufacturing vendor have lot of threats related to ownership of the design files, security of the files, monitoring and tracking of the production process, and so forth. For example, there is a high risk of intellectual property (IP) theft and counterfeiting when sharing the digital design file with the additive manufacturing vendor using conventional file sharing techniques. In particular, it is difficult to authenticate the additive manufacturing vendor and control accessibility to digital design files through current techniques. Additionally, additive manufacturing needs to be tracked for usage to limit the printing quantity per contract. There is limited traceability in current techniques, and that too requires a lot of manual efforts. Further, current techniques fail to provide for credible authentication of the additive manufacturing printer.